Pumpkin's rant of the day: Dressings on a Salad

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I had gone to write a different rant a couple of times but there seemed to be too much and I was getting myself down. So this one is a little more of a light-hearted rant but it is a pet hate of mine. I don't know if it's a new thing or something I just hadn't noticed so much before but it seems that you can't go out for a meal without having to have some sort of slime on a salad. Surely I can't be the only person who actually enjoys the taste of a fresh, crisp salad. The tastes and textures of individual ingredients. Why spoil that by making the entire thing soggy and taste of some random slop? I would also question whether the salad was fresh. What bothers me the most, I think, is when you read a menu and it doesn't even say that the salad is dressed. If something comes with a side salad, I assume it is exactly that. If it says it is a dressed salad, I know to ask not to have the dressing. The times I've been looking forward to a salad (even if it is just a little side salad with something else) and it's come out covered in goodness knows what, I am beginning to lose count. I really don't understand why, if they insist on giving you a dressing, they can't put it on the side. It also might be a nice idea to let people what the dressing is. Even if you like one sort, doesn't mean you'll like another. Some of the dressings look as if a snail has had a bad night out and a dodgy kebab. No, my problem isn't not liking dressings. It's partly not understanding why you'd spoil perfectly good food (food that is supposed to be crisp) with such things but it's mostly that you don't know what's in them. Yes, of course, you can ask but if it's something you're not expecting, why would you? I don't mind specifying that I don't want a certain thing but it does help to know that it's necessary to specify such things. The other thing is the point of having a salad. A salad is eaten because people enjoy it but also as a healthy option. It defeats the purpose of choosing something healthy if you're going to pour something over it which has a large percentage of sugar, as many prepared dressings often do. Yesterday was the latest example but that one was a little confusing. Mother's meal was brought out with a salad on the side. She exclaimed happily that there was no dressing. So I was then looking forward to enjoying my salad along with the rest of the meal. Yet mine (and everyone else's) had dressing on them. That makes no sense at all, to add it to some and not others - they were all completely different meals and the dressings were the same. The only thing I could think of was that Mother's meal was cold while everyone else's was hot but that still doesn't make sense to me to add a dressing to a salad on a hot meal and not a cold one. There are, I know, a lot worse things than that and I have had plenty of my time filled with them but I don't want to talk about that so I am talking about this instead. So, are there any chefs/cooks about who have any logical explanation for random salad dressings? What are your unusual pet hates?